Reader,

There are two themes that have been emerging in the clinical side of my work, both with therapy seekers and with clinicians I work with in consultation and supervision: more experiences of eating disorders and OCD-like behaviors, and a lot of conversations about control.

And if you’re thinking, “Oh shit, yes, everyone seems to be getting worse,” hang in there. We’re seeing people trying to create some sense of predictability and control while the ground keeps shifting beneath their feet. When the systems around want us to believe that we don’t have agency, it makes sense that our brains and bodies might reach for whatever feels controllable. That doesn’t mean the resulting behaviors are healthy or harmless, but it does mean we can understand them in context rather than as evidence that someone is simply “failing” at coping.

And this matters for you too. You are not failing at therapy because your clients are struggling in ways that feel increasingly complex, intense, or outside the neat little boxes we were trained to work within. You are doing the same thoughtful work you’ve always been doing under increasingly harsh circumstances, and sometimes the most liberatory thing we can do is stop pretending that the conditions surrounding the work don’t matter.

Which brings me to something I’ve been working on for a couple of months, (but really for my entire career...)

This month, I’m releasing Healing Is An Ecosystem.

It’s a 50-page, self-paced field guide for clinicians who want to expand their definition of healing, especially those who feel so burned out that you’ve forgotten to look beyond the amazing interventions you provide day in and day out. That forgetting is understandable. When we’re operating under oppressive conditions, our capacity to imagine can shrink right along with everything else. We become very good at solving the problem directly in front of us, and sometimes forget to ask what else might make healing possible.

​Healing Is An Ecosystem will walk you through 12 conditions that shape healing, and then take you further into expanding the ecosystem so you can begin thinking beyond the therapy room and your own role in a person’s healing. And finally it will invite you to remember the Medicines We Were Never Taught To Name, by noticing forms of healing, knowledge, connection, and support that many of us were never taught to recognize as legitimate in our professional training.

And maybe this is the question underneath all of it: What if some of what we call “symptoms” are also attempts to create a sense of control in a world that keeps taking control away? What becomes possible when we get curious about that without romanticizing the suffering?

You can find out more about Healing Is An Ecosystem here. And if you haven’t already, join the waitlist here so you’re among the first to hear when it’s released. And forward this email to a colleague or friend who might need this particular reminder right now.

Almost a year ago I started another very personal project: The Practice of Liberation.

​The POL is a written space for long-form personal letters about what decolonization and liberation look like in real time, not just at work or inside our professional personas. It’s about what it looks like to decolonize the personal, too: our relationships, our ideas about healing, our identities, our grief, our lives.

Every letter revolves around one theme and includes 7+ reflection prompts on that same theme, a 10-minute practice to help you integrate the ideas (and, when useful, bring the practice into your work with clients), and a book recommendation. The books aren’t therapy books. They’re books that help us think about the larger project of liberation from different angles, often in places we wouldn’t necessarily think to look.

This month’s letter is “The Land Remembers What We Were Taught to Forget.” It’s a beautiful piece about healing through one of the first connections many of us were taught to lose: our connection to land. If you subscribe to The POL, you’ll also get access to all the previous letters, 10 and counting, so you can wander through the archive whenever you want.

Hit reply and tell me this: where are you seeing your clients, colleagues, or yourself trying to create certainty or control in response to a world that keeps shifting beneath your feet? I want to know what you’re noticing.

With liberatory care,

Silvana

​​Liberatory Letters | The Practice of Liberation | Decolonize Your Practice​

PS. Healing Is An Ecosystem isn’t a resource directory or another list of things you should be doing for your clients. It’s an invitation to widen the frame: to map the conditions surrounding healing, notice what’s missing or already present, and consider who and what else might belong in the ecosystem besides you. Because sometimes the most liberatory intervention isn’t a better intervention. Sometimes it’s realizing that you were never supposed to be the whole ecosystem in the first place.

​Healing Is An Ecosystem helps clinicians expand beyond therapy and explore the conditions, relationships, and forms of support that make healing possible.

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⬆️ Let's connect!